FX's Capote and the Swans is an eight episode TV show (limited series) that is perversely entertaining; although remarkably crafted, with prestigious performers, and brilliantly written the series ultimately falls under the rubric of a "guilty pleasure." It's scandal sheet stuff, manufactured from Schadenfreude -- gist of the show is that the wealthy, beautiful, and socially elite have feet of clay and that their upper class world is as rotten with scandal and betrayal (or more so) as any other socio-economic milieu on which you might wish to focus. There's an element of Nietzschean resenttiment to the show: it exposes the foibles of the super-rich and convinces us that these elegant folk who consort with Presidents and royalty are just as bad as everyone else. This is a rather primitive point arousing a rather primitive response of titillation, moral condemnation, and, in fact, consistent with the show's broad theme: Truman Capote betrayed his intimate confidantes by writing salacious accounts of their misdeeds -- in other words, he tried to profit from gossip. This same interest in gossip underlies our interest in the show --that is, the show embodies what it is about. As a narrative, there's not much to the story -- everything the program wants to say is on full display in the show's first episode and, thereafter, The Swans, simply repeats itself, or, more interestingly, indulges in essay-like meditations on its themes. The show isn't a cliffhanger and can't really advance beyond it's premises except for certain quasi-philosophical ruminations on issues of class, race, gender, and privilege. With these caveats, I have to admit that I found the series compelling, although I'm a little ashamed of my interest. That said, the people who made this limited series are operating at the top of their game --Gus van Sant directs brilliantly, and the show has an all-star cast of notable female stars including Naomi Watts. Chloe Sevigny, Demi Moore, Calista Flockhart and others. Tom Holland who plays the squeaky-voiced, bitchy, and doomed protagonist, Truman Capote seems to me pretty much pitch-perfect. (I recall seeing Capote on the Dick Cavett show and, also other late night TV talks shows -- my dad liked him and always made us watch those programs when Capote was on-air; for a straight kid from Minnesota, Capote was like some sort of apparition from another planet -- you couldn't believe your eyes and ears, but you also couldn't take your eyes off of him and found yourself straining to catch his every word. He always hinted a levels of depravity that might even astound him -- and he seemed to be the most depraved thing on TV. I have no idea what my father, a preacher's son from rural Nebraska, really thought about him -- I assume he admired In Cold Blood and Capote's eccentric contribution to the Bogart movie, Beat the Devil, a movie that he liked.)
There's not much plot to Capote and the Swans. The show's premise can be explained in a couple of sentences: a brilliant homosexual writer amuses a group of Manhattan socialites and wins their trust; the writer is an alcoholic and self-destructive and he's suffering from writer's block so he decides to exploit his intimacy with the socialites (the Swans) by writing a tell-all story about their sexual peccadillos. There is a limit to noblesse oblige and the Swans, who have been harmed by Capote's writing, a short story called La Cote Basque, vow to revenge themselves on the writer. In a gross over-simplification of actual events, the Swans end up ruining Capote and hastening his demise. All of this dramatized in the show's first episode and so there's no suspense and no narrative energy after the first hour -- the last seven hours of the show are, in effect, variations on the themes established in the initial show. This gives the program a certain Brechtian effect -- it's not suspenseful and we're asked to attend to how things happen as opposed to engaging with any sort of plot. A summary of the first episode suffices to describe the whole thing: shifting back and forth in time between 1955 and a few days before Capote's death in 1984, we see how Capote served as "court jester" for a group of wealthy women whom he seems to have both admired and despised. The women form a hyper-exclusive clique that include Babe Paley, the wife of Bill Paley the head of CBS, Slim (Lady) Keith, Howard Hawk's former wife and a peer of the British Realm, Jackie Kennedy's sister, Lee Radizwell, and Johnny Carson's ex-spouse, Joanna Carson among several others. These women have already cattily excluded from their coterie another lady alleged to have shot her wealthy husband and evaded justice for that crime. The women exude money, privilege, and, even, culture -- Babe Paley is an important art collector. Capote, who has become a drunk, is between projects -- he is famous for In Cold Blood, but he hasn't found anything new to engage his talents. He's also quarreling with his boyfriend, Jack Dunphy. At a gay bathhouse, Capote meets a demon -- a man who has a large family but is a sexual addict and is slumming in the steambath. (This guy is filmed like a monster -- he's large, violent, and has huge ears that stick out from the side of his head in a way that make him look like hideous imitation of Mickey Mouse.) After a meal with the Swans at the Cote Basque, an encounter in which the women mercilessly mock Capote's erotic obsession with this man, the writer gets very drunk and, because he's out of money, has to go home on the subway with his date. The monster tells Capote (perhaps as revenge for his mistreatment at the hands of the Swans) that he should write and publish a story about them: he tells Capote that "answered prayers" cause more tears than those prayers that are "unanswered", giving Capote the title to the book that he tried unsuccessfully to write during the last two decades of his life, a sort of In Cold Blood about the jet-set. Capote follows this advice, publishes an indiscrete story, a sort of roman c clef in Esquire and the Swans band together to ruin him. All of this is very juicy stuff: the woman alleged to have shotgunned her husband to death commits suicide a few days before the story is printed and Capote is blamed for her death. Babe Paley's husband is a serial philanderer and gets tricked into having sex with "Happy" Rockefeller (Norman Rockefeller's wife) who has vindictively planned the tryst for the period of her maximum menstrual flow -- not a subject usually depicted on prime-time TV. This results to a gory mess in Babe Paley's bedroom, an outcome designed by Mrs. Rockefeller to humiliate Babe and her ex-lover. Babe Paley, who adores Truman Capote, and, in fact, seems to love him -- he's a witty, captivating, and cultured alternative to her rather brutish husband -- confides this sordid tale to the writer (who comforts her with caresses and barbiturates washed down with vodka.) Capote puts this anecdote in La Cote Basque, his short story, and a huge scandal ensues. The Swans close ranks and determine that they will destroy Capote. Of course, Capote is already on a downward spiral and will die nine years after the story is published. Babe Paley has lung cancer and she dies, after painful chemotherapy and radiation treatments, in 1978. The seven episodes following the first show are simply exercises in working out variations on the themes of self-destructiveness and betrayal dramatized at the very outset of the series. Two episodes stand out in this context for their stylistic boldness. The third episodes is a quasi-documentary account of Capote's celebrated "Black and White Ball" in 1966. The show is shot in the style of the Maysle's brothers (in black and white as well and implies that Capote had a sexual affair with one of the filmmakers). This is a very innovative episode although it's not successful and, in fact, I think is the dullest installment in the eight show program. The problem with this highly stylized and brilliantly made episode is that it establishes that by 1966, nine years before the La Cote Basque events that Capote was a ruthless manipulator, that he was keen to set the Swans against one another and that he was profoundly and indecently treacherous -- so, then, why are the Swans so eager to share their most intimate secrets with him and, more pointedly, why are they surprised when he betrays them? The fifth episode. involving efforts by James Baldwin to dry-out the horribly alcoholic Capote, plays like a sort of My Dinner with Andre -- it's essentially a long debate (or possibly a dream) between the two men in which Baldwin asserts that the Swans are particularly vicious exemplars of racism and White Privilege and that they deserve the indignities that Capote's prose heaps upon them. This show doesn't advance the action --- there's no action to advance -but it's fascinating and very compelling. There's even a slight whiff of horror about the show: Capote commissions a chef to kill a swan in Central Park which he has butchered and served to him. (Even the longwinded show about the Black and White Ball features some startling sequences -- for instance, Capote who has a vexed relationship with his mother, hallucinates her presence at the Ball (it's an early instance of the DT's) and dances with her apparition that no one else can see.) In the sixth episode, Capote dresses his female protegee for a fashion shoot with Richard Avedon. The theme of the program is that Capote is trapped in the past, obedient to fifties' paradigms of glamor and style. Working in Palm Springs, he meets a young man with whom he has an affair -- the encounters with the handsome young man, a blue collar HVAC repairman have the sizzle of a low-budget porno movie (handsome handyman with older customer). The episode mines a vein of pathos intrinsic in the material: Capote is aging, drunk, no longer beautiful or, even, presentable. If you live long enough, you become a relic and this is the existential crisis developed in this TV essay. The sixth episode doesn't advance the action with respect to the feud and feels like its superfluous, although rather affecting.
Both Capote and Babe Paley die on-screen in the seventh installment. This episode is not exactly a barrel of laughs, a bit mawkish, although undeniably (and, perhaps, inevitably) gripping -- in long form TV, you can't behold the death of characters that you have watched for six hours or more without some emotional reaction; if nothing else, mirror neurons are triggered. Feud has literally nowhere to go after this episode (both its protagonists are dead) and, so, the coda the eighth and final show, seems superfluous and misguided. In this last episode, Capote struggles to remain sober, but mostly without success. He desires forgiveness and writes a series of anecdotes in which a writer, a thinly veiled version of himself, atones for his past misconduct. On a granular level, this episode is beautifully written but it's wholly unnecessary and, in fact, exists, more or less, to besmirch Capote's memory -- the anecdotes recounted in the show aren't particularly compelling and the samples of Capote's prose on display seem banal. The show is out of steam and it has to reprise the hero's death, shown, more or less, in the same shot-by-shot sequence that we watched in the earlier seventh episode. In this interpretation of events, Capote destroys his manuscript for Unanswered Prayers, the roman a clef on which he labored in the last years of his life. The author's alarming mother makes another ghostly appearance; her hallucination encourages Truman to drink himself to death. In a macabre coda to the coda, Sotheby's sells Capote's ashes to the highest bidder for $45,000, an unbelievably crass transaction which I understood actually occurred.
Feud: Capote and the Swans is a febrile improvisation on themes fully developed in its first two episodes -- the last six shows simply repeat with decreasing assurance material presented at the outset of the series. The acting is tremendous and the direction, more or less, flawless. The problem with the series is its writing. On a line-by-line, scene-by-scene basis, Feud is brilliantly composed. But there is no convincing narrative arc and the material, bitchy gossip about socialites, is too thin to support the show's length and complex flashback structure. In effect, Feud is about a peculiar unrequited love affair between an unhappily married and frigid woman of enormous wealth and a lonely homosexual. Interesting subplots flare up, provide a few minutes of amusement, but, then, sink without a trace -- we would like to see more of the monstrous Jack O'Shea, Truman's boyfriend who urges him to write the fatal story about La Cote Basque -- I don't know if legal problems precluded a more complete development of this character; he appears in the first few shows and, then, simply vanishes. Similarly, Truman adopts O'Shea's daughter as his protegee and spends a couple of shows squiring her around, introducing her to his influential New York friends -- but she drops out of the show also, appearing, I think, for a moment at the gruesome end of the last episode but this doesn't satisfy our interest in her, or, for that matter, the relationship. As a last example, Capote gets embroiled in a lawsuit with Gore Vidal which he refuses to settle. We see his lawyer remonstrating with him. But this subplot melts away as well and we never learn exactly what happened to resolve this catfight -- a part of the show that suggests a whole other possible series: Feud: Capote v. Vidal. I have the sense that legal exposure may have limited the show's flamboyance in its final episodes. Nonetheless, I suppose one can recommend this program on its own terms -- the veneer of sophistication and literacy is applied to what is, in effect, a guilty pleasure, that is, a spectacle of mostly prurient and voyeuristic interest, a bit like the Real Housewives of Manhattan but with artistic pretentions. If the trashy premise of the show is accepted, I think, Feud: Capote v. the Swans is a success.
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